Why do they hate America?

A book review in Foreign Affairs highlights "Anti-Americanism"

"L'ennemi americain: Genealogie de l'antiamericanisme francais. Philippe Roger. Paris: Seuil, 2002, 601 pp. 126.00.

...France remains the country in which anti-Americanism finds its most sophisticated intellectual expression in the West. This phenomenon persists despite the fact that few countries benefited more from the American security umbrella in the twentieth century.

...At a time when anti-Americanism is rising around the world and in France, and when, thanks to the prospect of war in Iraq, Americans are unusually interested in what France has to say, two distinguished French intellectuals have written what amount to anti-anti-American tracts.

L'obsession anti-americaine, by Jean-Francois Revel (best known in the United States as the author of Without Marx or Jesus), finds anti-Americanism to be a product of French political and moral failures. L'ennemi americain, by the well respected scholar Philippe Roger, traces the historical development of an anti-American discourse in France on both the right and the left over the past 200 years.

...These books are Franco-French products, intended to contribute to ongoing debates in France about France. They are not interested in what truths anti-Americanism reflects about America, or what Americans should do to minimize the power of visceral anti-American feeling around the world. Nevertheless, the non-French world should take note. What the authors have accomplished is to define what Roger calls a discourse of anti-Americanism: a free-floating but well defined set of ideas and perceptions that, over time, have crystallized into a coherent world view. Anti-Americanism in this sense is very different from opposition to some specific American policy; it is a systematic view of the United States as a danger to all one holds dear.

On the one hand, anti-Americanism is, as both Revel and Roger convincingly argue, a self-referential Franco-French phenomenon largely untroubled by larger questions of fact. On the other hand, the rise and persistence of this discourse reflects actual historical trends. Anti-Americanism developed and persisted in France because the United States thwarted, threatened, and diminished that country. Anti-Gallicism in the United States has had a fitful and shadowy life because France has only rarely risen to more than a nuisance in American eyes. In the realms of power politics, economics, and culture, French anti-Americanism is the psychological footprint of a conflict -- a conflict all the more irksome to the loser simply because the winner never seems to have paid it much attention..."

Well, why do they hate us?

You ought to note that the review was of two new French books, both by respected intellectuals within France. Theyve identified the obsession with anti-Americanism.

One would have to have a very crabbed view, limited to recent history, to ignore that Europeans, in particular the French, have had a long history of obsessive anti-Americanism. Resentment of the leadership role of the United States in post-war Europe drove the French to leave the NATO military command and DeGaul to bitterly announce that America cared no more about the liberation of France than the Soviet Union cared about the liberation of Poland an intemperate absurdity, particularly egregious because it was made by an allied leader in the cold war.

According to Revel, French interest in America becomes a frenzy at the first report of bad news such as a rise in the unemployment rate. For days the French press will predict some dire end of Americas economic role. It is routine for the French to view the United States as the land of jungle capitalism, a place that is ruled by only the few super-rich. They consider American diversity ideas to have failed, and tout their dubious successes at integration. And the French continually lash out against American business as either uncouth or unfair, as they are empowered by too much money.

As I recall, more recently, 113 French intellectuals signed a hit peace, warning the world of an evil much greater than terrorism: the United States.

This started long before Bush.

Assuming you are not French, at least your opinions are not hypocritical. Given that France supported Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war (providing a major portion of his arms), helped make a mess of Zaire and Rhwanda, and 'historically' had more than its fair share of colonialism (e.g. Indochina) and brutality (Algeria) one wonders about the real source of the visceral dislike of American society and politics.

BTW, I got the story a little wrong:

"A group of 113 French intellectuals launched an appeal against the "imperial crusade" in Afghanistan: "In the name of the law and morality of the jungle" (not because 3,000 people had been murdered), "the Western armada administers its divine justice." Of course, if any parties in this entire affair believed themselves to be divine, it was the Islamists--the kind that murders thousands of innocent civilians in the name of Allah, or the kind that, in Nigeria and Sudan, massacres Christians for being unwilling to submit to sharia. In two months alone, several hundred Nigerian Christians were exterminated by Muslims. Our 113 intellectuals had nothing to say about it." Revel

From Stupid,

Of course you're not, that's self evident.